While Sarah has her hands full in her new social work position, I’ve settled into a nice little groove here at home. Here’s a short – and very long overdue – report.

Garden

We’re having a cool summer, with temps mostly in the high 70s/low 80s, peppered by a few heat waves. Tomatoes planted in April are just now ripening, namely ‘Flamme,’ a French heirloom. Fruits are small to medium in size, about 3″, with orange skin and flesh, and are mild, but rich in flavor.

‘Flamme’ tomatoes.

This is our second year growing ‘Black Beauty’ zucchini, another heirloom variety, and while it may not impress any summer squash aficianados, I’m liking it for two reasons: 1) the fruits are pleasantly flavorful and tender, even when large (12″), and 2) our consumption rate seems to dovetail with the plant’s production rate. No begging friends, family, neighbors, and total strangers to take zucchini; we harvest 2-3 fruit about every 3-4 days.

‘Black Beauty’ zucchini.

Contraptions built of PVC pipe and deer net/fence to protect the grapes and Bartlett pears from rats, squirrels and raccoons are working so far.

Bees

We had one of our worst seasons of losses last fall and winter, coming into this spring with only two hives. Sarah did splits, and we acquired a new colony from a fellow beekeeper in order to diversify our genetics. We’re now up to five colonies. We harvested honey from dead-outs in the fall and spring, but haven’t harvested much since, and I imagine we won’t have much of a summer harvest either.

The ‘newbees’.

Sadly, the specialty wine shop that carried our honey decided to close its doors after 130+ years of business. So, our relative slow pace of production hasn’t created any stressful consequences. In doing business with the wine shop, however, we entered the dark hole of business licensure and taxes. Unsurprisingly, we’re due to pay more in taxes than we will ever sell in honey or hive products. While we may have fantasized at one point about making a living keeping bees and selling hive products, we’ve long since realized that the scale of production necessary isn’t one we’re willing to pursue.

Simple bee-water system using wine corks pre-drilled and skewered.

On the upside: five hives in two locations has made our beekeeping a little more manageable.

Canning

Our pantry dwindled while Sarah traveled and studied in Guatemala last summer, and gratefully, she’s been diligent in restocking it. She’s made apricot jam from farmer’s market fare, plum jam from our Santa Rosa tree, and pickles galore from our garden. We’re growing ‘Mini White’ and ‘County Fair’ pickling cukes, and have watered more frequently this summer to ward off bitterness. Both make a tasty pickle, with Mini White sweetening up a bit in either lacto-fermented or fresh-pack processes. We’ve decided we like the flavor of fresh-pack pickles better than lacto-fermented, but admittedly, we haven’t mastered the art of lacto-fermentation to a point of consistent results. Our lacto-fermented sauerkraut and cauliflower turned out well, but our pickles have been hit-or-miss.

Next up: white peach jam, courtesy of fruit from a client’s garden.

Brewing

Sarah’s travels extended to Cuba last year, where she picked up honey from a few different sources. Her host Yaritza gifted her with two big rum bottles bought on the street. We suspect it had been thinned with water, since it began to ferment soon after Sarah returned home. Tragically, Yaritza was diagnosed with a brain tumor a few months later, and passed away after a surgery to remove it. In her honor, I hope, I made an orange mead, using ale yeast (Safale 05) for the first time.

Lately, I’ve been avoiding Campden tablets so as not to introduce unnecessary sulfites: instead, I gently heated the honey in water, bringing it to a near-boil, then letting it cool. I juiced the rest of the oranges and five Bearrs limes from our trees, which yielded about a gallon of juice. Raisins (a more natural alternative to yeast nutrient) and high-quality jasmine tea (to provide some tannins) rounded out the recipe. Since so many of my meads and melomels have seemed to need years of maturing, the inspiration to use ale yeast was to create a ready-to-drink mead. I still need to either rack it again, or go ahead and bottle it, so how ready it is remains to be seen.

Yesterday, I started a plum wine. I’ve been trying to use fruit from the freezer, and had a few gallon ziplocks of whole Santa Rosa plums, along with two 1.25 liter bottles of plum juice. To that, I added a few pounds of cut-up Burbank plums, a sizeable sprig of tarragon and a 2″ length of cinnamon stick, along with about 4 lbs of white sugar and about 3 lbs of honey. I used a yeast I haven’t tried before: RP–15 Rockpile, a yeast isolated in Syrah-making described as emphasizing fruity flavors. It’s always fun to experiment, and I’ve been looking for a good yeast for my meads and melomels that isn’t a champagne yeast or derivative.

Stirring the plum wine mash.

Sarah’s vinegar-making has filled our cupboard with red and white wine vinegars, so I also started making shrubs – another great way to use freezer fruit. The best to date were a blueberry shrub with red wine vinegar and a peach raspberry shrub with white wine vinegar.

From my internet perusing, the general rule of thumb for shrubs is 2 cups fruit: 1 cup sugar: 1 cup vinegar, but I have found I like a less sweet, more vinegary drink, so I add less sugar during the maceration period, then more vinegar to taste during the maturation or rest period. The process timeline varies according to different websites, for example, how long to macerate the fruit and sugar, as well as how long to steep the mixture in vinegar after maceration. Another variation includes whether to add vinegar to the sugar and fruit mixture or whether to add it to the strained syrup (from the fruit and sugar).

The ultimate difference might be in the health benefits rather than the flavor: no matter which process you use, the end result is a uniquely tasty, refreshing drink. If you’re using unpasteurized vinegar, like we do, I imagine the health benefits remain stable, but that’s just a guess. We didn’t intend to jump on the hipster shrub bandwagon here, we just had all the raw ingredients at hand, and plenty of them: fruit, sugar (honey) and vinegar.

Tomorrow, we will move two of this Spring’s beehive splits to a new host property. It’s always exciting when splits flourish, and it’s a relief to have a wonderful place to keep these two.

I’m especially excited, though, by this particular location. Only 4.6 miles (and 12 minutes!) from our decidedly suburban neighborhood, this new property sits on the crest of a hill at about 500 feet (compared to our lowly ~15 foot elevation). The property is hot, dry, and exposed, but these hives will live in a cooler microclimate under an old oak tree. 20 feet away, there’s a Toyon tree in bloom. I cannot wait to taste the honey these bees make!

The bees themselves come from one of our longest-lived lines and are our best honey producers. I split them in suburbia in April, then moved them to a temporary rural location, where the queens mated.

Tonight, we’ll go out in the dark to close up the hive entrances. We’ll site the hives on the new property tomorrow morning.

Looking down the slope to the chosen hive location.

We hope this cooler microclimate won’t be too damp and chilly in the winter.

We also hope the old oak tree won’t drop branches on the hives. Yikes!

We’ll move the two hives on the left to this new property. The larger one might be having some queen troubles, though their population looks great. If needed, we can combine the two later. The queen in the smaller hive has a fantastic brood pattern.

As I write this, five jars of red and white wine vinegar and their vinegar mothers sit in jars in the kitchen, working away. I grew all of the vinegar mothers from scratch last summer, experimenting with various mixtures of grape mash, water, sugar, and honey.

Last August, I wrote about the confusing and contradictory information on making homemade vinegar. I fretted over whether my batches of vinegar from store-bought mother and from scratch would turn out. Vinegar making seemed like a strange and complicated science experiment.

9 months later, I can say with conviction that vinegar is indeed a wild science-y miracle as, I suppose, are most culinary and propagation endeavors. But making vinegar is also pretty easy, requires little time on the human’s part, and produces fabulously tasty results.

Here are the most important lessons I’ve gleaned from my first 6+ rounds of vinegar:

Fruit flies rock. I initially read conflicting opinions on the importance of allowing fruit flies to colonize the vinegar concoction when one is trying to raise a vinegar mother from scratch. Short answer: almost all of my jars of fruit, water, and sweetener quickly grew beautiful vinegar mothers in the presence of swarms of disgusting little fruit flies. The flies’ magic comes from the vinegar-making bacteria on their feet. Once you have a vinegar mother established, there’s no need to include fruit flies in the jar for future batches of vinegar.

Making white wine vinegar is harder than making red wine vinegar. Virtually all of my red wine vinegars taste amazing. Not so with the white wine vinegar. The mothers appear less robust, and the vinegar sometimes tastes a little ‘off’. Maybe I’m still acquiring my taste for the real deal? Since white wine is higher than red in naturally occurring sulfites, it’s more difficult for the Acetobacterium that turn wine into vinegar to flourish. I generally use wine that has no added sulfites for this reason, but have found that my vinegar mother readily turn ‘regular’ red wine into vinegar with no problem. Perhaps the subprime Acetobacterium conditions caused by the higher sulfites in white wine also explain why my white wine mothers have been more prone to molding. But more on that next…

Neglect your vinegar mothers too long, and they will mold. After bottling finished vinegar in December and feeding the mothers their wine/water mixture, I got busy and didn’t tend to the jars until mid-April. While the majority were still doing fine, some of the smaller jars of white wine vinegar had grown flamboyantly colorful mold patches and had to be thrown out.

One of my biggest points of confusion when I started this project was how long it takes for the mother to turn the wine into vinegar. I now know that it takes about a month for a new layer of mother to form on top of the wine, indicating that the vinegar is ready for consumption. Timing definitely depends on the size of the mother in relation to the amount of liquid you add. It will take a small mother longer to digest the alcohol in a comparatively large amount of wine. However, once your mother has finished her first batch of wine in a given jar, she should be able to complete the next batch in the same sized jar in about a month.

Darkness isn’t required for vinegar mothers to do their thing. As with most of my projects, I’ve become lazier and relaxed my standards over time. In the beginning, I thought vinegar mothers needed total darkness to be happy. These days, my ladies live in glass jars on top of the refrigerator (for warmth), and I’ve scrapped trying to swaddle them in towels to keep them in the dark. They’re growing just fine.

My happiest (and only remaining) white wine mother. I keep my ‘vinegar records’ written on painter’s tape on the sides of the jars.

I love the layers of mother that build up in the jar over time. If I were in the business of maximizing my vinegar production, I would be diligently dividing these pieces of mother to start new production jars.

I have to admit, I am having so much fun watching the total harvest pounds and dollars add up for 2015. As always, a disclaimer: we aren’t actually selling this produce–just calculating how much we would have had to spend if we had purchased it.

The raspberries and strawberries have come on earlier and stronger this year, as have the mulberries. The loquats on the other hand are abysmal; the tree appears to be dying. Kelly, being the passionate pruner that she is, is hatching plans to renovate the tree in hopes of bringing it back to some semblance of health (or at least sickly determination).

On the chicken front, Luma, now over 3 years old, is laying better than ever. One of the fun things about keeping good harvest records, is being able to remind oneself of last year’s numbers. Luma laid 17 eggs last April compared to 21 eggs this month.

Maybe it’s the treat mix Kelly lovingly concocts and sprinkles in the run each morning and evening, or maybe it’s genetic luck, but Luma is not abiding by the common wisdom that chickens stop laying after 2-3 years. You go, girl!

We continued harvesting honey in April on a frame-by frame basis. Sadly, due to California’s terrible drought, plants that would normally bloom in summer here, are blooming now. As a result, the bees had some unusual April food sources. Several of the hives were bursting with honey when I went in to inspect, and there will be May honey harvests too.

Kelly proclaims the sauerkraut, ‘perfect,’ ‘fabulous,’ and ‘just the way sauerkraut should be.’ There is none of that is-it-my-imagination-or-is-this-slightly-rotten taste we experienced when we broke into the smaller spicy sauerkraut batch just a few weeks into January. I’ve picked up the same questionable flavor in most of the homemade krauts I’ve tasted that are less aged. Despite our trepidations, we ate the spicy kraut for a few weeks until Kelly decided it didn’t agree with her guts, and I began to feel queasy after indulging in my morning spoonfuls.

With this four-months-aged kraut, I do detect what might be described as a subtle fish tank flavor, but Kelly hasn’t picked up on it, and it’s really just aquatic tasting rather than fermented/rotten tasting.

Mostly, though, it’s satisfyingly sour, with a good crunch. The kraut toward the top of the jar is slightly discolored, but we can’t tell a taste difference between the top kraut and the stuff lower in the jar.

Secretly, I had all but given up on this batch of sauerkraut, eyeing its slightly browned contents with distrust. It had lived on the kitchen counter since New Year’s, in plain sight, but we had avoided actually opening it for a taste when the three-month mark recommended in the recipe came and went. Opening the air lock lid tonight, we were braced for disappointment.

Having finally tasted a mature sauerkraut, we’re now convinced we should be more patient with all of our lacto-fermented veggies.

With success still fresh, and being my annoyingly overenthusiastic self, I immediately suggested harvesting a few of the cabbages currently in residence outside and starting a new batch, but Kelly insists this half-gallon jar will last forever.

After taking out the little jar that had been weighing down the kraut…

Apologies for the weird YouTube link post that popped up earlier today, folks. It’s origins are mysterious, and I just changed/reinforced all the passwords. Now that I’m on the blog, here are a few recent photos of the chaos around here!

Three of the umpteen splits in their temporary home/mating grounds.

Taking the screen off the entrance of a split I had just moved. Boy, were those bees mad!

Two beekeeper friends came over to retrieve a swarm. They experimented with a plastic mesh potato sack on the end of a stick. Personally, I prefer a 5-gallon bucket!

March was a month of oranges and eggs. It also brought with it three swarms from our hives (that we know of!). I made seven walk-away beehive splits, and carted said splits around in the back of my car (nothing quite like driving through the suburbs in a bee suit to the tune of 50,000 buzzing insects in the backseat).

I had every intention of chronicling our various adventures, but March was also a month of schoolwork and work-work. Hopefully, I’ll soon be able to devote more of my time to working outside and to writing about it.

Here’s the belated tally for February’s harvest. Keep in mind, we aren’t actually selling all this produce–just calculating how much we would have had to spend if we had purchased it.

Some of it isn’t even available at the store. Kohlrabi, for example, is hard to come by if you don’t grow it yourself. Likewise, I wasn’t sure what price to put for some of the herbs.

Some harvests would have been bigger, were it not for vicious attacks by the local squirrel patrol. We lost three big, beautiful cabbages in one day to them.

On the upside, this is our best spring honey harvest to date. I think we have my early January hive inspections/extra-boxes-adding and unusually diligent follow-up February hive inspections to thank for this bounty. In beekeeping, timeliness can really pay off.

Over the past two days a crew of workers descended on the garden, bringing with them an enormous crane, a cherry picker, good old-fashioned shovels, and soil tamping equipment. Basically, our worst nightmare.

Nothing quite like having an enormous crane toting a 50 foot pole high above your home and garden to make you feel tiny…

All the commotion is due to the utility pole in the far corner—a decrepit rotting beacon, frequented by woodpeckers and boasting over 60 years on the job, according to its weathered metal tag.

We’ve worried it would someday fall, weighed down as it is by high voltage wires, and leaning at a precarious angle. We’ve also worried that replacing it would wreak havoc on our precious growing things. And we’ve been particularly concerned about the grandmother fig tree just a few feet away.

The tree is almost more dead than alive, but each year it produces some of the best green figs we’ve ever tasted. With the help of a magnifying glass, we counted over 120 rings on a branch cut off several years back, before the tiny lines blurred in the last half-inch from the edge.

Who planted this tree, long before any of the houses on our block were built? This question continues to fascinate me, and I feel an especially ferocious urge to protect the tree.

Months ago, when PG&E started making noises about replacing the pole, I expressed my concerns to everyone in uniform I caught in the backyard. Of course, they all assured me that the tree would be fine, and of course I didn’t believe them.

Some of them also alluded to the fact that there is absolutely nothing I can do to stop them from conducting whatever work they deem necessary in that corner of the lot. This is true, and it’s an unpleasant reminder of how powerless we are when it comes to power line easements.

But we are fretful controlling types and tend to take action even at the risk of looking ridiculous. Early yesterday morning, Kelly procured a roll of bright yellow caution tape and we set about cordoning off…just about everything.

The fig, all tied up.

We tied the fig’s drooping branches back and strung tape around the raised beds, the grapes, the asparagus. When the crew arrived, we affected friendliness and gave them one last talking to. The young guy who had just hung his key ring on a delicate fig twig, snatched it away and (to his credit) marveled openly at the tree’s age. (I rounded up for that uncountable last half-inch of tree rings—Believe it or not, this tree’s 140 years old. Please be really, really careful!)

This morning, with a larger crew on-site and a gargantuan crane leering over the side fence, I was back at it with the foreman—I don’t mean to be paranoid, but does the crane operator know about the fig tree?

And then, like magic, an hour later the job was done.

The crane picked the new pole up off the street like a Tinkertoy and lowered it down exactly into the new hole—no wild swinging to and fro, no smashing the greenhouse to smithereens. The only knocks the fig tree endured were from the workers brushing past, and even then most of them dutifully ducked out of the way.

Only once did one of the men stoop under the caution tape to take a detour down a path between two raised beds. My hackles rose. I wondered if he would step in the leeks or the purple cabbage, or the spring onions, or the mustard. Then he saw that the way ahead was blocked by yet more tape, and he gave an audible grunt of annoyance, turned on his heel, and took the high road around the veggies.

I’d say we all weathered the new pole amazingly well and that it’s time for me to update my notions of what big equipment can accomplish in small spaces. What did I really think, anyway—that we would have a 50-foot pole swinging like a pendulum across the whole backyard?

The bees, hanging out with the crane on the other side of the fence. They were very well-behaved.

Playing it safe with the veggies.

And, lest there be any confusion about our wishes….

Up, up, and away!

As the new pole dropped lower, I feared the worst.

…But then the workers threaded it through the whole mess of wires, and…